Now we remember how it ruled the world

Many people who are deeply immersed in the industry of personal technology today are barely old enough to remember the time when IBM ruled all it surveyed. Whether you liked it or not — and its competitors certainly didn’t — IBM was deeply entrenched in every large and medium-sized corporation in the world, and its reputation and its stock price were unassailable.

Although IBM responded well to the advent of the personal computer, it never quite figured out how to square the new development with its traditional mainframe business, and eventually allowed clone makers like Compaq to beat it to market with the latest technology. It has spent nearly a decade trying to regain lost ground. And now, after an especially tough couple of years including massive layoffs, first-ever losses, a badly tarnished reputation and some botched product releases, IBM hopes it is on the way to regaining a chunk of lost glory.

THE LESSON OF THE ‘90S: PROPRIETARY DOESN’T PAY

On Nov. 10, the company did what would have been unthinkable a decade ago: It released a detailed strategy paper laying out its directions for what it believes is the future of its business — multimedia distributed computing. The strategy is deep and comprehensive and covers the company’s existing product line from personal computers to workstations to mainframes. For the first time, it sheds more light on its relationship to Taligent and Kaleida Labs, its two joint ventures with Apple Computer.

And unlike other grand but unsuccessful IBM strategies such as SAA — the IBM-centric Systems Application Architecture that tried and failed to pull its disparate computer systems together into a common programming architecture — it claims to have an ironclad commitment to working with other vendors, standards organizations, and even analog technology. It’s the lesson of the 1990s: Proprietary doesn’t pay.

Two heady religions. “We’re stepping up to the plate,” says Michael Braun, assistant general manager of multimedia for IBM, “and telling our customers that when it comes to business, education and the government, standalone multimedia is interesting, but not very.”

What IBM seems to have discovered is a heady blend of two religions, the first being the power of networks and the second being multimedia itself. Not long after a damning U.S. Labor Department statistic was released a couple of years ago, showing that workplace productivity was actually down despite billions invested in so-called productivity tools, companies using electronic mail and other inter-office communication started piping up about the great benefits of enterprise networking.

The name doesn’t matter. Combine the benefits of networking with those of multimedia, widely acknowledged as a rich new form of communication, and the pieces snap into place. Braun believes IBM understands the applications and requirements of a distributed, heterogeneous network — i.e., connected computers of all different kinds with no central controlling processor.

Even more important for the nascent multimedia industry, IBM seems to have learned the hard way that any vendor who wants to sell multimedia into business, education and government must find a way to work within the existing, eclectic infrastructures already in place — a crazy quilt of personal computers, workstations, file servers and peripherals hooked with everything from coaxial cable to fiber to copper phone lines.

DO CORPORATIONS WANT MULTIMEDIA?

The assumption, of course, is that corporations are on some inexorable path toward needing vast stores of digital information on line. How much multimedia data in most corporations is already digital? Not much, compared to what’s still on paper or film. Text, certainly, and spreadsheets. In some companies where print collateral is regularly produced, perhaps some digital imagery.

In larger corporations, especially those which produce goods, there is probably a library of advertising videos, and perhaps some training materials on VHS tape or laserdisc. But generally speaking, the plain-vanilla corporation of today doesn’t have a lot of digital video or sound. It does, however, have boatloads of undigitized data that could be invaluable when combined with existing digital data, if only it were easily accessible.

They’re sitting up now. Braun believes that the potential benefits of delivering either analog or digital media over a corporate network in a variety of applications is making corporations sit up and take notice. His group is in charge of convincing customers that there’s a need for multimedia in the enterprise, but he says it’s selling itself.

“We have companies we’re bidding now that are developing connected multimedia applications involving literally thousands of workstations and kiosks,” he says. “Once the light bulbs go on, which usually takes a pilot application and one person inside the company that ‘gets it,’ the benefits are obvious to them.”

NETWORKED MULTIMEDIA: THE ONLY THING THAT MAKES SENSE

Now that corporations have bought into improved communication as the heart of saving money and gaining a competitive edge, networked multimedia communications is looking very good to corporate customers. Braun says they “jump on it,” especially applications such as kiosks, which actually generate revenue. IBM research says multimedia will become “the core communications vehicle” within the corporate structure.

As proof that this concept holds water, Braun offers the factoid that IBM’s multimedia business — video boards, PCs, authoring software, multimedia integration services — is up 98 percent so far this year.

BEFORE THE STRATEGY, THERE’S A CAVEAT OR TWO

IBM’s multimedia strategy methodically addresses distributed applications, a distributed systems framework with multimedia enhancements, application tools and services, data services, distributed services, communications and networking, systems management, multimedia server solutions and multimedia standards.

However, before launching into details of the strategy itself, a note of warning. This is not the first time IBM has developed a Real Big Strategy that makes all its disparate product pieces fit together and justifies the need for expensive, IBM-labeled products. The company has made some whopping mistakes in the past, including its rift with Microsoft over a shared, SAA compatible user interface between Windows and OS/2, its “home computers” such as the PCjr and, more recently, the PS/1. And then there’s the Prodigy Information Service, affectionately known in the online community as “Plodigy” for its achingly slow performance.

The strategy IBM announced on Nov. 10 has taken many of its past mistakes into account, and is trying to mitigate the damage done. It is significantly more open than in the past, and is far ahead of the pack in acknowledging the vital importance of networked multimedia.

But it is risky for IBM in a couple of ways. First, it is quite aggressive in schedule: Braun says he expects all the pieces to be in place by 1994. Second, it moves well beyond the borders of IBM’s traditional businesses and embraces a much richer range of information, including both digital and analog in the grander scheme. But even the company might argue that there is nowhere else to go; at this point, it seems to be a risk that must be taken. The world’s largest and most influential computer company is redefining itself around a world filled with rich media, and what it does in that world will certainly have its effect in the next decade and beyond.

Starting with Ultimedia. IBM announced the Ultimedia product line of personal computers in October 1991 (see Vol. 1, No. 5, p. 16), and the company is in the process of extending its workstation family to include low-cost multimedia player models, multimedia portables and RISC System/6000 Powerstations that are multimedia capable. As it does so, it is enhancing many of the key elements of distributed computing, such as interoperability and data interchange, to accommodate multimedia.

Common user interfaces. One such accommodation is IBM’s old Common User Access interface, or CUA. (Part of the SAA feature set, it’s been said that CUA caused the final rift with Microsoft.) Much like Apple’s Macintosh or Next Computer’s NextStep software development systems, the CUA provides developers with a common visual metaphor for services such as volume buttons, slide bars and other graphical data objects for controlling multimedia data streams.

In addition to CUA, IBM is also developing what it calls a “Natural User Interface,” or NUI, that will include audio and video help functions, video icons and prompts, and language query or speech recognition for help, navigation or commands. As with CUA, software developers can build applications using the NUI — thus providing familiar cross-application features that have proven such a boon to Macintosh users.

Multitasking a multimedia necessity. OS/2’s Multimedia Presentation Manager allows an OS/2 application to work directly with a multimedia device to request that it play and record, and simultaneously control and synchronize the data streams. Though common enough for standalone systems, these features pose enormous challenges when multimedia data is sent over a network, and require a multitasking operating system. The kind of network communication that guarantees audio and video designed to play together will arrive at the same time is called “isochronous,” for “at the same time.” IBM is developing specialized hardware and software that address the problems of isochronous multimedia.

DATA SERVICES: WHERE IBM SHINES

As an old-line mainframe company, storing and retrieving vast amounts of data on large networks is how IBM made its reputation. Since multimedia content (i.e., video production, animation sequencing, etc.) is expensive to produce, IBM wants it considered a corporate asset to be used as much as possible across different applications throughout the enterprise.

IBM believes that standard data management technologies can maximize these assets by sharing, saving, cataloging, archiving and recovering multimedia content in the same way it has for more traditional information assets.

Some new methods required. Most standard systems such as NFS (Network File System), the de facto standard in the Unix world, are fine for doing “store and forward” transfers of blocks or files of multimedia data. However, because multimedia data is time based and stream oriented, IBM has had to investigate new methods of doing client-server communication for rich data types. The company has developed a couple of solutions. One is an $8,500 analog video server called the Ultimedia Video Delivery System (VDS) based on IBM’s AS/400 minicomputer. Another is a large-scale digital multimedia server, based on IBM’s big-iron Enterprise System/9000, called Workstation LAN File Services.

The VDS is a very interesting bridge system. It controls analog devices such as laserdisc players, TV tuners (IBM sells a board called PS/2 TV) and cable tuners hooked up to the network, using a technology called “F-Coupler” to support up to 70 simultaneous multimedia sessions on a token ring LAN with no impact on digital applications running in the same environment.

In addition to its development of digital multimedia servers — allowing the ability to add, delete or edit content on an ongoing basis that’s not possible with analog media — the company is also exploring the potential of using digital servers together with analog distribution, in order to offload heavy video processing onto the aforementioned analog bandwidth.

NETWORKING MULTIMEDIA IS FRAUGHT WITH LAND MINES

In a networked environment, these scenarios are fraught with land mines. There is no way to control how many people want access to anything on the network, whether it’s video or text. The video must play on each person’s desktop, regardless of its operating system. And even if each person on the network wants to access the same piece of video at half-second intervals, it’s vital that the audio and the video are isochronous.

Although IBM has not yet announced a complete solution to the problem, it says it’s using existing products, such as Workstation LAN File Services at $250 per LAN, on the ES/9000 as the basis for developing a server that can serve hundreds of multimedia data streams concurrently. It is also developing multimedia servers based on the RS/6000 Unix workstation and its PS/2 computers.

Databases and compound documents. Second, it will extend its powerful relational database technology to support multimedia. Database technology is critical to the success of multimedia in any enterprise, and it is upon this sword that many vendors will fall.

After all, it doesn’t really matter how well a networking interface is implemented if the database cannot effectively retrieve information when a user asks for it. IBM speaks of combining the best of relational database technology with the power of object-oriented databases for handling the vast amounts of data stored in a corporate multimedia network.

The company says it intends to provide certain database management products to support multimedia data types so that one database can be used to store and manage all the data on the network. This will be a particularly interesting challenge when it comes to packaging rich data into compound documents or using various media as part of a human interface, as it will be when developers implement the Natural User Interface tools of video icons and speech. The capability to respond quickly, accurately and in synch will put even the finest database tools to the test.

Storage is critical. And third, the vital function of managing the heavy storage requirements of multimedia will be managed by the system, instead of manually. In other words, the network will be able to keep track of a hierarchy of storage devices, as well as perform catalog, backup, migration, relocation and archiving functions. How serious a problem is storage? Consider the following:

• 500 pages of text = 1 MB
• 10 fax pages = 640 KB
• 10 color or detailed images = 75 MB
• 5 minutes of uncompressed audio, voice quality = 2.4 MB
• 5 minutes of CD-quality audio = 52.8 MB
• 1 minute of uncompressed, ¼ screen, animation-quality video = 147 MB
• 1 minute of ¼ screen, animation-quality video at 100:1 compression = 1.47 MB
• At 100:1 compression, a two-hour, TV-quality (VHS) movie = 2 GB

Obviously, without compression, practical storage of digital video is impossible. But even with compression, an enterprise that attempts to store and retrieve any significant amount of video will run into the need to build entire rooms for its arrays of magnetic and optical storage devices.

Certainly both compression technologies and digital storage will evolve, but until then, IBM claims its networking strategy will support both analog and digital storage devices for multimedia, including analog tape for audio and video, film, paper and optical discs.

Remote as local. Because so many different devices must be hooked into the network, IBM sees the need to support access and sharing of remote data as if the data were local. Via a system called “system-managed storage,” data files and data-management files will be stored independent of the storage device so even if a file is offline at the time someone requests it, the system can pinpoint its location.

This is a good solution for people who have significant money invested in analog storage or even CD-ROM jukeboxes, and it also allows more flexibility for the network to support many disparate clients that may be storing multimedia objects, including DOS, OS/2, Windows, Macintosh Novell Netware, AIX/6000 and SunOS machines.

THE NITTY-GRITTY OF NETWORKING

The bottom line of distributed multimedia computing from IBM’s point of view is that anyone on the network should be able to video conference or collaborate in real time, or store or retrieve any kind of multimedia information at any time, from anywhere, on a standard network. The user should never know whether he or she is even operating over a network; all the storage and retrieval and system operations should be invisible.

To accomplish this in existing networks, IBM claims it will provide application support, extensions to existing networking protocols such as TCP/IP, SNA and OSI, and will provide all the subnetworking support required, including exploiting existing LAN wiring, enhancing them to support continuous data streams, supporting new multimedia networking interfaces such as ISDN, ATM and ADSL, and providing high-speed interconnections between systems that support multimedia.

Fiber and fast-packet switching will be supported, and IBM is already implementing the multimedia data stream extension of the Internet, the Experimental Internet Stream Protocol Version 2. And if you’re not sure what you have or what you want, it will provide consulting services.

In addition, though distributed computing is definitely where it’s at for the future, in the corporate setting centralized management of media resources will be very important as well. Kiosks need it to control the flow of content and updates, and to troubleshoot remote network sites. Training and educational applications will be networked and delivered “just in time.”

A MAJOR PARTICIPANT IN STANDARDS SETTING

As is true for any large company, IBM sits on a vast number of national and international standards committees. They include all the major image compression committees, including MPEG for motion video and HyTime, which extends the SGML standards to time-based media; multimedia and hypermedia objects; compound documents; high-speed multimedia networking (ISDN, ADSL, FDDI, ATM, etc.); wireless local networks; and voice-data networks.

Its Ultimedia line supports the Interactive Multimedia Association’s practices for portability. OS/2 2.0 supports MIDI, PCM, ADPCM, CD audio, CD-ROM and CD-ROM XA. Action Media, IBM’s digital-video adapter card, supports DVI, the Intel-IBM open(ish) standard for image capture, compression and playback (see Video for Windows story, p. 19). Its Person to Person video conferencing system will be ISDN-enabled in 1993. PS/2 TV supports NTSC and PAL. And not only is IBM helping define and support the standards, but the Multimedia Presentation Manager in OS/2 2.0 will provide a conversion service between formats.

On various platforms the company supports RIFF and Bento container formats for data capture; MPEG, DVI, JPEG and JBIG compression and decompression; CD-ROM, read-once and Photo CD storage.

TALKING TALIGENT AND KALEIDA LABS

Supporting standards is always like rooting for the home team; you don’t have to worry about anyone not liking you for doing so. But slightly riskier is the company’s participation in joint ventures with longtime-rival Apple Computer.

Its Taligent venture, to create an object-oriented operating system for RISC systems, is on schedule and its work will contribute to the object management work that will be done in database systems for multimedia. More interesting for Digital Media readers, however, is how its Kaleida Labs joint venture fits in with its larger strategy.

Networked ScriptX is coming. Kaleida, you may recall, was founded in part to invent a universal scripting language (called ScriptX) for interactive multimedia that allows developers to write an application once to run on multiple platforms. In addition, Kaleida is creating runtime environments for titles, the Bento container format for multimedia data and a consumer operating system for handheld and other consumer-targeted devices that have never been IBM’s forte.

In addition, and of particular importance to IBM, is the networked ScriptX which Kaleida is also developing to allow users to develop distributed applications for any ScriptX-enabled platform.

“Kaleida serves a very important role, especially in the network world,” says Braun. “Most people are thinking about the standalone space right now, because that’s where multimedia lives. But think about titles on CD-ROM that play on Macs or Windows or DOS machines or wherever. Now picture me in a heterogeneous network world, wanting to do the same thing. ScriptX becomes even more important, of even more value.”

Perhaps a match with IBM tools. IBM has found a novel way to move ScriptX into its Ultimedia Tool Series. The Tool Series is an affiliated label program of independent tool makers that helps give them marketing clout in a very fragmented market. They have their own specialized marketing channel, called Media Sorcery, which has as its sole charter selling multimedia tools.

Braun says Tool Series members have to agree to import and export a certain set of formats. “Obviously what we want to do when we have ScriptX is to use the Tool Series technical council as a way to leverage ScriptX into a large number of tools,” he says. “First we got the tools working together, next we start solving the problems of customers, then ScriptX will be available; that’s the strategy. Of course, it’s premature to say that the members have agreed to use ScriptX, but we’re hoping they’ll like it and will see the benefits. In any case, we’ll have an organized forum where we can have that dialogue.”

DUCKS IN A ROW AGAINST MICROSOFT?

Both IBM and Apple hope that Kaleida may finally provide the crowbar they need to pry Microsoft out of top slot in the operating-system world. Kaleida’s consumer operating system is designed to interoperate with ScriptX-developed applications and titles to allow playback on consumer platforms. If this strategy is effective in pulling high-profile consumer electronics firms into the Kaleida fold, developers will certainly follow — and Microsoft might eventually be forced to support ScriptX. (We can hear Microsoft muttering now: “In a pig’s eye… .”)

The benefit to users, of course (how easy it is to forget them), would be that they’d have far fewer annoying surprises about whether X title worked in Y consumer player or at the office. This would be vastly preferable to watching the vendors waste their time bludgeoning each other about whose incompatible standard is more worthy of developer talent and time.

Of course, nothing is ever that easy, and IBM still has a very steep road ahead to convince DOS and Windows users and developers to move to OS/2. Braun doesn’t like to address the question directly. He says, “When we go to conferences we see whizzy demos and we don’t ask what’s running those things. The response time is good. They look great. But when people go to design these applications, it hits them and they have to ask those questions.”

Is OS/2 the cornerstone? What he’s getting at, in case you couldn’t tell, was the superiority of OS/2 to Windows for multimedia. “The one thing that everyone knows is that multimedia loves storage, memory, MIPS, the more color the better. If you really want to squeeze every ounce you can out of the hardware, you need a strong system,” he says. “OS/2 ain’t the only platform, but it is the best for multimedia on an Intel-based platform because it is the most robust.”

Yes, but we must remind Braun that it makes no difference how good OS/2 is if everyone is using Windows, which today is true. If OS/2 is really the cornerstone of IBM’s strategy, it may be in trouble.

From a user’s standpoint, he says, it doesn’t matter anyway because multimedia networks, as IBM sees them, will include all kinds of computers, among them Windows and OS/2. But if Microsoft’s MPC or Windows developers decide for some reason that ScriptX isn’t good enough for them, Microsoft will still rule the roost. Microsoft is as formidable and nasty a competitor today as IBM was in its heyday, and as the software giant comes closer to shipping its new Windows NT operating system, the marketing shenanigans between the two companies are likely to escalate dramatically.

WHAT A DIFFERENCE COMPETITION MAKES

No matter what the outcome, however, it’s just good to see IBM back in the game with a sensible strategy. It never would have shaken off its inertia without the intense competition provided by companies like Microsoft, so in the long run — and barring any proof of unfair competition — its fall from grace will prove to have been a healthy thing.

IBM’s stumble is a topic for an entire book, but certainly the fact that it was crippled by its own size and power was a significant factor. The corporation’s restructuring to split the company into separate operating units was the most important first step it could have taken back to health.

Making it easier. Braun says all the independent IBM divisions are implementing multimedia across their product lines, and as they do so, he says, his job actually gets easier instead of harder. “Now all these companies have to act in their own self-interest,” he says. To help the company understand the value of multimedia internally, Braun’s group started the Market Focus Community, where executives from each of the divisions work on common issues.

“Now that they can see what the others are doing, the competitive spirit moves everything forward,” says Braun. “It’s a different kind of politics. Before, when we were telling them what they had to do, their natural human reaction was to say, ‘Don’t tell me what to do.’ Now … they move on it.”

A PERFECT CASE OF ‘ACT AS IF’

If there is a downside to the world’s biggest computer company finally getting its act together, it’s that it all sounds too tidy. We’ve all heard the saying that when things get tough, “act as if” they’re fine and eventually they will be. And there are a lot of “ifs” in IBM’s strategy.

So, the story goes, if Braun is right and IBM’s customer base is starting to clamor for multimedia networks, and if those customers still have enough faith in IBM to invest in the company’s strategy and solutions, and if the technologies it develops for multimedia enterprise computing actually come out of the oven according to recipe and on schedule, then the company may be able to say, “We did it.” But if IBM cannot manage to turn the tide in its favor with this strategy, multimedia will be the biggest albatross a company ever tied around its own neck.

Denise Caruso